What do you get when you cross a consortium of big data center customers and IT suppliers (the Open Data Center Alliance started by Intel last October) with an open source server and data center design project started by a hyperscale Web company (the Open Compute Project founded by Facebook)?

Cards on the table: I’m not a Star Wars obsessive. I have precious little interest in the prequel trilogy. Indeed, I prefer the high velocity chutzpah of the Clone Wars animated series. And I don’t own any Hayden Christensen action figures either, although there may be a Slave Leia in my sock drawer.

A month after open-sourcing what it calls "the first major hypervisor" to arrive in half a decade, cloud computing pioneer Joyent has added this hypervisor to its flagship service, allowing Linux and Windows applications onto the Joyent Cloud for the first time.

A theory has emerged as to just how the personal website of controversial bus millionaire Brian Souter came to be stuffed deep into Google's closet of invisibility. It appears that the (probably inadvertent) culprits may have been a group of Bahraini freedom fighters.

Following my inaugural experience with one of London’s ‘Boris bikes’ I considered reviewing the slick Barclays Bikes app – the bank is the main sponsor of the cycle scheme in the capital. Yet apart from being too London-centric I didn’t want to find myself saying anything complimentary about the banking industry. So I checked out a few other apps before settling on Bike Hub.

Outspoken hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb has discharged another strongly-worded letter to Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang and the board, urging changes at the top to bring the company back from the brink.

Network interface cards (NICs) are often overlooked in server design. Their sheer ubiquity, combined with the ability to deal with most networking problems in software, can make them a component whose exact specifications are ignored.

Jeremy Hunt is fed up with BT's slow response to pressure from communications watchdog Ofcom and ISP rivals over the telco giant's pole and duct pricing plans that are expected to be revealed later this month.

Data centres are a big capital expense. A 10,000 sq ft data centre designed to last 15 or 20 years costs about $33m, so you have to think about it a lot more carefully than you do about buying a server or a piece of software.

Following an emergency all-night sitting of the Special Projects Bureau Celebrity Backronym Perusal Soviet (the agreeably palindromic SPBCBPS, as it's known at Vulture Central), we can announce that our Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator (LOHAN) hypobaric rocket motor test chamber will henceforth be known as the Rocketry Experimental High Altitude Barosimulator, or REHAB.

Search engines and internet service providers (ISPs) could be forced to make it harder for users to access copyright infringing content online under new UK communications laws, the Culture Secretary has said.

The Boundary Commission for England (BCE) has defended its decision to release more than 500 PDF maps of proposed Parliamentary constituencies, stating that they believe they provided "an appropriate level of detail".

Fox Home Entertainment has celebrated the release of Star Wars: The Complete Saga Blu-ray disc set, by holding events all week, climaxing with a party tonight in London that'll see the BT Tower become a giant lightsabre.

Windows 8 will include a version of Internet Explorer 10 that uses Microsoft's "Metro" touch interface, and this new-age browser will not allow plugins – at all. The move is yet another blow to Adobe Flash, which is famously banned from Apple's iPhone and iPad.

Scientists have discovered a planet that orbits two suns, like Luke Skywalker's home planet Tatooine in Star Wars. Two hundred light-years away from Earth, gaseous Kepler-16b is similar to Saturn in both size and mass and – like the desert planet that nurtured the young Skywalker – enjoys a double sunset.

Canonical has set up a site to help developers package and sell the code they produce. The site is designed to help to popularize the operating system, encourage new popular apps, and create more commission revenue for the open source organization.

The chip world is moving from multicore to many-core, says Intel chief technology office Justin Rattner. In certain circles, such talk makes sense – a many-core chip includes many more cores than a multicore chip – and according to Rattner, the transition to a many-core world won't be as difficult as expected.

Despite prior hints – and a Redmond developer conference that was all about app compatibility – Microsoft’s Steven Sinofsky has said that software for x86 Windows 8 systems will not run on ARM architecture.